Scarcity is important to functional economies and is usually the reason something is considered valuable. This can be applied to the mundane (currencies, baseball cards) all the way to the philosophical (love, limited life span). For most of human existence, scarcity was managed by the laws of the physical universe. Gold is rare because those atoms were not fused together frequently, life appears to be rare because the optimal conditions for it to arise are improbable and our time on Earth is...

Scarcity is important to functional economies and is usually the reason something is considered valuable. This can be applied to the mundane (currencies, baseball cards) all the way to the philosophical (love, limited life span). For most of human existence, scarcity was managed by the laws of the physical universe. Gold is rare because those atoms were not fused together frequently, life appears to be rare because the optimal conditions for it to arise are improbable and our time on Earth is...